Month: August 2015

19th Century Russia is Current America?

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Portrait of an Unknown Woman - Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi
Portrait of an Unknown Woman – Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi

“The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world… He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, ‘in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress,’ etc. etc.”

-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Soviet Ray Bradbury Animations

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Zdes Mogut Voditsya Tigry

I’m a fan of Soviet-era films and cartoons. The number of ham-handed, ideologically-driven films is not as great as one might think. There are plenty of faithful adaptations of western literature with high production values even on low budgets, and sensitivity to the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the stories. There also many comedies, and things like crudity and nudity are fairly rare. Plus, my wife grew up on many of these, so it has been a great way to bond. Yesterday I came across two animated shorts that I hadn’t seen before. Both are 1980s adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories (there are English subtitles). The plots are altered somewhat. Here There Be Tygers explores the beauty in life, and how our responses to that beauty reveal who we really are. Innocence and self-sacrifice are contrasted with destructive greed. There Will Come Soft Rains changes why the automated house is destroyed, introducing a darker, and more disturbing apocalyptic theme with a religious subtext. This is a good reminder that both animation and science fiction can be very serious art forms indeed, and definitely worth watching.

The Historical Context of the Family Proclamation

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Over at Worlds Without End, I’ve written a piece on the political and social context in which The Family: A Proclamation to the World was developed. Laura Compton at Rational Faiths has demonstrated that the LDS Church’s entanglements with same-sex marriage date back to the early 1990s and spawned the creation of the Family Proclamation. I agree that this is the origin of the Proclamation. However, I think there is more going on in the Proclamation itself and within the political climate that produced it than is typically realized. Discussions over welfare and family breakdown had increased in frequency and popularity throughout the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, leading up to welfare reform under President Clinton. For our readers who have an interest in our posts on marriage and family here at Difficult Run, Mormonism, or both, you might find my post interesting.

Check it out.

Wisdom from Milton Friedman

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848 - Friedman

Greg Mankiw shares this sentiment from Friedman:

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.

This is exactly the kind of doggedly pragmatic idealism that causes my spirit to resonate in sympathy. The stubborn refusal to give up on striving for a better world while keeping a pretty cynical view of human nature is–for me at least–one of the really deep, definitional aspects of the right wing of American politics. We’re not Utopians, but that’s not because we don’t care.